Public Speaking in English: From Monotonous to Charismatic
We’ve all witnessed monotonous speeches during presentations and in other public speaking situations.
A monotonous speaker can be defined as someone who lacks tone or pitch when speaking, which often translates into a deficiency of passion, enthusiasm and emotion.
The most memorable speeches in history are the ones that are injected with emotion. This is because it is the emotion that moves people, engages them, and maintains their attention, rather than words alone.
The problem with monotonous speeches is that they tend to be easily forgotten due to the listener not being impacted enough by the message, or simply because of losing their attention during the speech.
The wisest and most intelligent message that lacks emotion and enthusiasm when communicated, will fall short in terms of its impact on its audience.
In this post, you will learn six public speaking strategies to break up the monotony and become a more charismatic speaker.
1. Understand that enthusiasm comes from within
Enthusiasm cannot be faked. It has to be genuine, which means that you must be enthusiastic, excited about, and believe in the topic which you are addressing to your audience.
Even better, be obsessed with the topic.
Just imagine that you don’t care very much about a topic you’re talking about but you try to inject emotion into that speech. It isn’t going to work. Your audience won’t buy into it because intuitively they know that your enthusiasm isn’t there.
2. Find a way to be passionate about the topic
In order to sound passionate about a topic, you must connect with ‘what makes you passionate about that topic’.
Sometimes this can be a challenge when you have spoken about the same topic many times. If this is the case, always remember that your audience probably hasn’t had the same exposure to the topic as you.
Therefore, remind yourself what made you passionate about the subject in the first place, and re-connect with that.
Secondly, associate ‘purpose’ with the theme of your speech. Why are you talking about such a topic? How will your audience’s lives be improved after they have heard your speech?
Thirdly, identify or include some aspects of your speech that excite you, such as a story, an unexpected result or extraordinary statistics.
By injecting your personal excitement to come out as you speak, you will automatically and authentically sound more charismatic and less monotone.
3. Emphasize keywords in a different tone within the sentence
Placing extra emphasis on a specific word(s) gives extra energy to the sentence and changes the way it sounds.
This is a simple technique, but one which completely breaks up the monotony, and consequently holds the audience’s attention more than if you pronounce every word with the same tonality.
Try saying the sentence below in a monotonous tone followed by solely emphasizing the ‘30%’.
“Last year there was a sharp increase in sales of 30%.”
Now read the sentence and emphasize ‘increase’.
“Last year there was a sharp increase in sales of 30%.”
Can you hear and feel the difference?
4. Demonstrate your enthusiasm in your actions
Your body language is an important factor when it comes to grabbing the attention of your audience and looking charismatic.
As a general rule, the more restrained you are in terms of body movement, the less your listeners will hold their attention.
You don’t want to be excessive with your hand gestures and movement, but you want your enthusiasm and conviction to come through in your body movement.
Making a gesture or motion with your hand as you say something you want to emphasize will help it stick in your listener’s mind. However, if you exaggerate your movement and your hands are constantly moving, no specific point will stand out. Therefore, it is important to have balance as regards to how much you move.
There is also an overlap between your movement and voice tonality.
Moving as you speak will not only increase your overall energy, but it will naturally make you emphasize words. Thus, making you sound less monotonous and more enthusiastic.
As well as this, make sure you smile and maintain eye contact with your audience. Two simple actions that have a huge impact.
5. Include strategic pauses
There are many advantages to purposely adding pauses to your speech.
The first one is that you sound and look more authoritative when you pause.
As well as this, pausing helps your audience absorb your message, gives you time to think, calms your nerves, helps eliminate filler words (like “erm”), and portrays confidence.
While a nervous speaker talks fast, a confident speaker often speaks slowly while integrating pauses.
Speech monotony isn’t only about tone and intonation. It’s also about pace. Pausing gives a different dimension to your pace of speech.
I suggest pausing after asking questions and giving important information that you really want the audience to absorb. This will help you emphasize the key points of your speech.
6. Focus on the message you want to communicate rather than the English mistakes
I often hear non-native speaking executives tell me that when speaking in their mother tongue, they feel and sound more charismatic than when they give speeches in English.
One of the reasons for this is that they are naturally more confident speaking their mother tongue but lack confidence speaking in English because of a fear of making mistakes.
When somebody fears making mistakes in English, they tend to focus on avoiding making mistakes.
An important principle to remember is this: wherever you direct your attention is what you’re going to attract.
Therefore, if you’re worried about making English mistakes just before making a speech and how other people will judge you for these mistakes, that’s where your focus is. As a consequence, you will make more mistakes and reduce your fluency.
So the more you focus on AVOIDING making mistakes, the more unstructured and less fluid your speech will become and the less confident you will feel.
A solution to this to is consciously switch your attention to the message you want to communicate while taking away your focus from making mistakes.
This way the communication of your message will flow much better and you’ll sound more confident and enthusiastic.
Take Action
Implement these 6 strategies in your next presentation or speech in English and record yourself so that you can self-evaluate how you did.
If you want personalised orientation with your public speaking in English, click here to book a complimentary coaching session with me. During the session, I will give you suggestions on how you can reach your English communication goals.
